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No, its not. I have a 13" MBP 2011 and I swapped out the 4GB RAM with 8GB and noticed a huge difference. Earlier it used to beachball all the time but its much better now. Right now, Chrome alone is using 3.5GB+ memory.

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Anecdote:

I've got a 2011 15" with 256g SSD and 16gigs. I still get beach balls far more than I think I should. They never go away, just get less frequent. :/

Have you tried running a hardware test? You shouldn't get beach balls at all while waiting for something. They're not called spinning balls of death for nothing.

hardware test at the genius bar is 'fine'.

Doing a clean reinstall (not just restoring image) seemed to solve similar problems for me in the past; I probably could have debugged exactly what files were messed up, but a fresh install was a whole lot easier. I've had this happen a few times, particularly on systems which were 10.7 and then various 10.7 and 10.8 Developer Previews finally updated to release 10.8.

I'm having a weird problem right now where iMessage doesn't work on an iCloud account for a system which had iMessage installed separately (on what, 10.7? I forget), then upgraded. Presumably the same fix will work.

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